Vagabond Witness: Victor Serge and the Politics of Hope

cemetery

Introduction:

the art of not dying away

Dazzling. That was the last word Victor Serge ever wrote. In his poem, ‘Hands’, a meditation on a sixteenth century terra cotta, which he had finished and typed up in the early hours of the day that would be his last. That evening, Tuesday 17 November 1947, he had gone out to see his artist son, Vlady, but he wasn’t at home. He met Julian Gorkin, his old comrade, who had traveled from revolutionary Barcelona to greet him in Brussels when he was finally allowed to leave Russia. They talked for a bit before shaking hands and parting. Probably feeling unwell, he decided to take a cab home. His heart gave way before he even had time to tell the driver where he wanted to go.

Gorkin went to the police station to identify him just after midnight:

In a bare shabby room with grey walls, he was laid out on an old operating table, wearing a threadbare suit and a worker’s shirt, with holes in his shoes. A cloth bandage covered the mouth that all the tyrannies of the century had not been able to shut. One might have thought him a vagabond who had been taken in out of charity. In fact, had he not been an eternal vagabond of life in search of the ideal? His face still bore the stamp of bitter irony, an expression of protest…¹

He had arrived here six years before with Vlady - his companion, Laurette, and his daughter, Jeannine, would come later - fleeing from Nazi-occupied Europe, leaving behind a lifetime of political activity - an anarchist in France, a syndicalist in Spain, a critical Bolshevik in Russia, an agent of the Comintern in Germany and Austria, years of internal exile in Russia, a supporter of the revolutionary POUM in Spain, of which Gorkin had been one of the leaders. The journey had taken six months on a cargo ship he described as ‘an ersatz concentration camp of the sea’. There were more than 300 of them on it, including the surrealist Andre Breton, with whom Serge had campaigned in Paris against the Stalinist show-trials, and Breton’s wife, Jacqueline. Oddly, the passengers included the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, on his way to a new post in New York. Levi-Strauss was clearly in awe of Serge: he was a man, after all, who had known Lenin, but he found his physical presence at odds with his preconceptions. ‘more like an elderly and spinster aunt …with an asexual quality …very far removed from the virile and superabundant vitality commonly associated …with subversive activities.’ This, surely, says more about Levi-Strauss than it does about Serge. (Although he complained, Levi-Strauss traveled in comparative comfort compared to most of the passengers, as he was one of the few to have the use of the ship’s two cabins.)

By stark contrast, the young man who would become Mexico’s greatest writer and who would eventually win the Nobel Prize, Octavio Paz, had met Serge in Paris not long before and was ‘immediately and powerfully’ drawn to him. ‘I spent hours talking with him, ‘he recalled. ‘Serge’s human warmth, his directness and generosity, could not have been further from the pedantry of the dialecticians. A moist intelligence. In spite of his sufferings, setbacks. and long years of arid political arguments, he had managed to preserve his humanity. …I was not moved by his ideas, but by his person …an example of the fusion of two opposing qualities: moral and intellectual intransigence with tolerance and compassion.’ (It was Serge who introduced Paz to the work of the French painter/writer, Henri Michaux, ‘a discovery of capital importance for me’.)²

Their journey involved yet another period in prison (this time in French-run Martinique) and, then bizarrely, his first ever flight in a plane. Mexico was not his choice but there was nowhere else, and it had become a home of sorts to thousands of political refugees, thanks to Lazaro Cardenas, the former president whose government was one of the few to have supported the Republican side in Spain, and opened the country to many Spanish and other exiles.

But the exiles brought their disputes with them, and these were often violent. Only a few months before Serge got there, Trotsky had finally fallen to the assassins who had pursued him for so long. (A previous attempt had involved an armed raid on his compound led by the Communist artist David Siqueiros, who would eventually find refuge in Chile, thanks to the intervention of the Chilean consul-general in Mexico, a poet who would come in time to speak for thousands in his hatred of oppression, one Pablo Neruda. Strange days indeed.)

Serge’s and Gorkin’s own lives were threatened and on more than one occasion they had to go into hiding. The country’s president received appeals from US and British politicians and intellectuals calling on him to protect them. At the same time, the editor of a magazine to which they had contributed was being told by the Interior Minister, Miguel Aleman, later to be President, that the governments of Britain and the USSR were demanding that all platform be withdrawn from these ‘agents of Hitler’. Meetings were broken up and, on one occasion, Gorkin and another comrade were stabbed.

Always poor, and often indescribably lonely, (as he wrote to a friend), he explored the country. And he wrote and wrote and wrote - for Partisan Review, Politics, Horizon, New Leader (as their Mexican correspondent), The New International, Mundo, Libertad y Socialismo. And three more novels: his best, his most ambitious yet, against all the odds to add to the four he’d already published, The Long Dusk, The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years. And a life of Trotsky with his widow, Natalia Zedova, a real act of generosity given Trotsky’s abuse of Serge when he had dared to disagree. Only one of these would be published while he was still alive. Writing for the desk drawer, he called it.

With characteristic lack of self-pity, Serge wrote in his notebook: ‘It is terribly difficult to create in a void without the slightest support, without the least ambience …at the age of 50 …facing an unknown future which does not exclude the possibility that the dictatorships will last longer than the rest of my life.’ And he was living at an altitude, over 7,000 ft above sea-level, that could do him no good whatsoever because of his heart, and learning to live with endless temblores (earthquakes), 2000 recorded each year.

And he read and read, making sense of the world as the ever worse news reached him from Europe. And he developed his interest in psychology. He’d always believed in the soul, what Vlady called his ‘materialist spirituality’. This interest was encouraged by his friendship with the revolutionary German psychiatrists, Fritz Fraenckel and Hubert Lennhof. He was grief struck by Fraenckel’s early death - he was only 52 - in June 1943, and it was a year before he was able to write about him, forcing himself to do so, knowing ‘only too well the frailty of memory and the iniquitous and impoverishing omission which entombs the dead’. ‘I owe a great deal,’ Serge wrote, to his ‘intelligent equilibrium in a time of instability and to his intellectual richness, which the malicious and the foolish weren’t able to appreciate on account of his ways as an amused, sad and irresolute Bohemian …‘How light he was on the earth!’ At his funeral Serge said, ‘Nobody who came close to him escaped his influence, everyone has been made at least a little better.’ (Lennhof whispered, ‘You don’t know how much hostility there was towards him.’)

And it was here in exile that Serge wrote his single, greatest work, the incomparable Memoirs of a Revolutionary, a work of political witness and engagement and solidarity, unparalleled since. The very first lines speak of a deep feeling he had known from childhood, of ‘living in a world without any possible escape, in which there was nothing for it but to fight for an impossible escape’. (The very same existentialist dilemma was being articulated thousands of miles away by Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir …)

Looking back on his life, Serge said:

I give myself credit for having seen clearly in a number of important situations. In itself, this is not so difficult to achieve, and yet it is rather unusual. To my mind, it is less a question of an exalted or shrewd intelligence, than of good sense, goodwill and a certain sort of courage to enable one to rise above the pressures of one’s environment and the natural inclination to close one’s eyes to facts, a temptation that arises from our immediate interests and from the fear which problems inspire in us.

Among the countless things he had seen clearly: that the creation of the Cheka (the secret police) in 1917 was one of the Bolsheviks’ ‘gravest and most impermissible errors’; that the Bolshevik leadership had lied about the nature of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921; that the Communists would turn on the independent revolutionary left in Spain; that Stalin would eliminate the entire 1917 revolutionary generation in order to safeguard his power; that Russia had become a vast prison camp. (It was Serge who first described the state as totalitarian.)

And yet he never lost hope, that ordinary people would act for themselves and take control of their own lives. On the ship taking him away from Europe he recalled, ‘The Russians and Spaniards among us know what it is to take the world into their hands, to set the railways running and the factories working …no kind of predestination impels us to become the offal of the concentration camps.’ He wasn’t one of those former communists, whose ‘god had failed’, for he had never had one. For him there was no inevitability in how the revolution had turned out, any more than there was inevitability in anything. History was made by men and women who made choices.

Hoping to return to Europe, Serge envisaged a democratic renewal, ‘of traditional democratic freedoms made revolutionary once again’, in order ‘simply to practice the art of not dying away’.

* * *

It would be wrong to suggest that Serge was completely unrecognized during his life. Far from it; it was precisely his standing internationally that protected him from Stalin and brought about his and his immediate family’s release from the Soviet Union, although it could not save his remaining relatives, most of whom would die in camps.³ And, because he wrote in French, several of his novels and his poetry were published in France, although obviously not in Russia. (One, Midnight in the Century, was even nominated for the Prix Goncourt, the prestigious French literary prize, in 1939, although it didn’t win.)

And he had his influential admirers and supporters who included the radical US critic and editor, Dwight